Two birds with one stone. I'm not always very good at that, but Mme Salut! is an expert.
So it was that early in an occasionally scary drive that was meant to take us to the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, we veered off towards Syria instead. And were back in time for a Valentine's dinner among an almost exclusively Lebanese crowd in Beirut.
This is where we had lunch in Damascus. It is the Jabri House or Beit Jabri restaurant in the heart of the old city, and it is an absolute treat, a bright and green courtyard with excellent food, a mixed clientele old and very young and the pungent aroma from shisha smokers at every other table.
I wondered whether the restaurant had some connection with the Syrian side of the family of my (Canadian) colleague Michael Jabri-Pickett, but apparently not. He did, however, pass on a tip from his wife: "Yabrak, rolled grape leaves with meat and rice inside. Joud (his wife) says it is really good." Good or not, it wasn't on the menu, though we were perfectly happy with what was.
We had little time to see more of Damascus than these narrow streets. It was, as I imply, an impulsive decision that took us there in the first place. Friends in Abu Dhabi had said it would take for ever for me to get a visa, because Syrians by and large find journalists the kind of people they can quite comfortably get along without.
Well, it took only a few words of encouragement from Makram, a driver rightly recommended to us by colleagues who had visited Lebanon for work, to confirm Mme Salut!'s instinct that it was worth a try. And at the Masnaa border crossing I was just a bloke with a British passport, not someone applying to the Syrian embassy in the UAE as a resident with a visa stamp screaming the guilty word of my trade. When it came to the bit requiring me to identify my occupation on the entry card, I wrote executive in large letters and let the rest of my title at The National (editor) slip gently away into a barely illegible suffix. It worked.
And all of three or four hours later, we were at Masnaa again on our way back to Beirut.
No picture exists of where we celebrated not St Valentine's night, but its eve, the 14th itself being a) our day of departure and b) preoccupied, in Beirut, with a massive rally marking the fourth anniversary of the St V's Day massacre that killed Rafik Hariri, then prime minister, and 22 others.
Our dinner was held in a large hall of one of the seafront palaces, the Monroe, a short hop from Pigeon Rocks, unfairly described in the guide books as Beirut's one natural feature, which you see above as my first image.
There was Arab music, belly dancing, sumptuous Lebanese food and the spectacle, on a nearby table (perhaps containing the only other non-Lebanese diners), of three ladies, dripping in diamonds and - in two cases - sporting tip-of-nose plasters that identified the (probable) cosmetic reason for their presence in Beirut.
And despite the brevity of our visit, we managed to pack in a fair few things: lunch in the impossibly chic Le Place de l'Etoile; a trip to the magnificent Jeita Grotto, where, in the cable car, we met these Shiite girls on a school outing from South Lebanon.
We also saw the start of the Bekka Valley, snow on hilltops, battered buildings left in disrepair decades after the civil war ("the owners are dead or have left," Makram explained) and the mountaintop Catholic church of Notre Dame, the views from which attract visitors of all faiths and none.
I will post more photographs from our two-country break at the overflow site. My midweek column at The National also deals with what the headline writer decided was "A (brief) tale of two cities".
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